Main Conference Day One: Tuesday, 11 May 2010

Stream Chair:

Peter Barta
CEO
Everest Group Australia

Attend these sessions if you find yourself here:

• Centralisation project
• Lift & Shift
• Not yet operating as a commercial business
• Small savings achieved by aggregation of processes
• Basic automation, no real performance management or measurement

Attend these sessions if you find yourself here:

• Starting to bring together functions
• Increased automation and a focus on driving value from operations and reducing rework and errors
• Achieved a certain level of capability and commercial operations are delivering real value
• Established performance measurement, benchmarking and business partnerships
• Analysis and/or execution of selective sourcing Phase Three
• Outsourcing/offshoring
• Cross functional process streams (e.g., financial services, HR, TAX, PMO
• Delving into front office functions (facilities management, customer management
• Strategic supply chain, real estate, non traditional value add

The GFC has brought a new paradigm to Government operations in almost every market. Revenues have disappeared and cost efficiencies are top of the agenda. The bureaucracy is under scrutiny, more efficient solutions to service delivery are the order of the day and spending is on notice. Support services and shared services are required to provide greater returns faster and efficiently. What about the rules of the games? Have they changed?

How will you increase productivity and enable front line service delivery more efficiently?

1.00 Small Steps Or Big Leaps? Considering The Scope, Scale And Structure When Beginning Your SS Journey

• Determine which functions to incorporate
• Decide whether it’s better to start small with a few transactional processes or go large and ensure maximum efficiency savings
• Assess how the interface with the rest of the business will be handled
• Highlight the dependencies that exist across process and sub processes
• Build a structure that supports flexibility and growth

Charles Reis
General Manager, Shared Business Services
MMG Minerals & Metals Group

1.00 Balancing Value-Creation And Economies Of Scale

Shared service centres are quite often serving multiple customers that differ in their size, business drivers and stage of growth.

In doing so, they aim to balance two competing objectives:

1. Creating value, by tailoring services to customers’ business drivers
2. Realising economies of scale, by standardising services

Those who get this balance right realise operational efficiencies, while at the same time build a trusted partnership with their customers. But this balancing act is more complicated than it seems. To use a restaurant analogy, it involves marrying the standardised low-cost convenience of “Fast Food outlet’ with the tailored, choice-driven, high price menu of ‘A-la-Carte restaurant’.

Ganesh Kashyap
Director
Dowling Consulting

1.00 The Secret To Successful CRM: How We Are Managing Our Customers In Large Government

Large SSOs, both in terms of employees and customers, require a range of strategies to excel at customer service delivery. This will make or break its success and reduce scepticism amongst its customers. The positioning and branding are critical to establish a business environment where customer focus and relationships with customers top the list of priorities. In addition, CRM technology, as well as Customer Relationship Managers will also be important to ensure that customer plans and needs are developed with a view to supporting the SSO to focus on what is needed for customers to deliver their own front services.

• How will you establish a CRM structure?
• Will you need a platform to manage all your customer needs and contacts?
• How do you identify the real customers?
• How do you listen to the “voice of your customers”?
• How do you filter your customer needs and add them to your own plans?

Guy Nicholson
GM Shared Services
Department of Primary Industries

1.50 Surviving The Waves Of Change – How Do SSOs Adapt And Thrive Through Organisational And Business Environment Change?

Addressing business units’ reluctance to support shared services is a key concern for all stages of the cycle. Ongoing people and change management within an organisational culture are critical for initial success and future growth. Change management is continually cited as one of the most needed and most challenging skills to master.

During this session you will learn how to:

• Align all your stakeholders to one common vision
• Determine the goals and objectives (whether your SSO is ensconced into company culture or the initiative is new)
• Utilise the tools and techniques for affecting change
• Recognise that change management is not short-term, but rather an ongoing partner of business improvement

Michael Zouroudis
VP & Accounting
ABB

1.50 Improving Key Controls And Delivering Valuable Insights For Your Customers

• Partner with your customers to deliver valuable business information and insight through internal and external data mining
• Improve key controls and reporting which drive operational improvements
• Design and implement operational and customer dashboards
• Enhance your customer interface and “ease of doing business”
• Drive consistent service excellence through data analysis
• Support a culture of sustainability, innovation and continuous improvement

Suzanne Young
Executive Manager Shared Services & CPO
Qantas Airways Limited

1.50 Process Improvement: Enabling Your SSO To Achieve Sustainable Savings

When planning for the launch and roll out of a SSO, identifying your baseline is critical to analyse your performance, increase transparency and the value delivered. But what about your internal/external processes? E.g Procure to Pay, Hire to Retire, Payroll, Ordering of Goods and Services, Billing, and so many other that underpin the back office support services. This is an area often overlooked in the first year of a SSO, yet, it is from process simplification and redesign that sustainable business improvements can be identified.

• How many touch points until the service is delivered?
• How many people are involved?
• What systems and technology are critical or not?
• How much paperwork is needed?
• Do you issue internal invoices?
• How do you map, simplify and realisation these processes so that your SSO delivers value and savings?

Cesare Callioni
Senior Director and Chief Operating Officer, Queensland Health Shared
Service Partner

5.35 Running Shared Services As A Business: Developing Your Pricing & Chargeback Model For Commercial Value And Sustained Success

Many SSOs have difficulties establishing a pricing strategy because of the difficulties associated with the nature and structure of the back office support services. Pricing requires establishing a transparent and flexible way of “billing” internal clients, and also demands an understanding of volumes or services used by the internal client.

• The SLA: Just another contract or a partnership in the making?
• Define or advance your allocation/chargeback
• Understand the activities involved in delivering your services and how they are linked to cost pools
• Implement innovative client-centric strategies to your pricing structure
• Knowing how to communicate the cost for services

Virginia Walker
GM Business Management
Commonwealth Bank of Australia

5.35 Loose Vs. Formal Governance Structures. The Right Fit For Your SSO

Regardless of the scope, the leaders of a SSO are required to serve as stewards for new ways of doing business. There are critical skills and competencies required for the SSO to govern the delivery of services in a leveraged manner. The way we structure our framework will vary depending on several factors. What’s key, is recognising the most appropriate fit for your organisation, one that will align with your business goals and integrate internal customer knowledge.

• Achieve harmonisation and standardisation or core processes
• Receive solutions for collaboration and business management
• Adopt common processes to protect your company’s assets

Alison Harrop
Divisional Director Global Financial Services
Macquarie

5.35 Can HR Services Show The Way To Delivering Strategic Stakeholder Value

Picture this - you were appointed to the role of GM, HR Shared Services, of a medium/large organisation. Your brief from the CEO is to transform the HR function to deliver integrated value, to brand the organisation as Employer of Choice, to attract and retain the best talent, to minimise the impacts of the current GFC on the skills available and workforce, and use the most efficient technologies to deliver efficiencies.

• Where do you start?
• Transformation or more of the same with spin?
• Strategic or just a back office function?
• Enabling the capture and retention of the best and the brightest. How?
• Centres of Expertise in HR. Why? What will they achieve?
• The HR mindset: Unique or professionalised?
• Is it about people or technology or both?

Joseph Soalheira
Advisory Board Member
SSON

6.25 Managing The Growing Pains Of A First 1-3 Year Implementation

The unprecedented growth of SSOs which are incorporating additional services from the business units, present a number of challenges such as how to consolidate service delivery from regional offices, how to define and implement performance metrics for newly absorbed services and how to combine often disparate technological platforms.

• Receive examples of governance structures to avoid disturbance to business and absorb new services rapidly
• Prepare performance metrics and criteria for success to ensure comparable and enhanced service delivery
• Utilise communication tools to harness knowledge from business units and manage loss of talent (close consultation with clients programs, internal formal/informal training programs
• Manage the change associated with expansion taking into account, the current cultural elements

Les Dingley
General Manager Business Performance
Hydro Tasmania

6.25 Panel Discussion: Captive/Outsourced/Both? Architecting A Best-In-Class Delivery Model To Fit Your Business Hand-In-Glove

As the “make or buy” decision has morphed towards “make and buy” for many captives, the biggest question facing most leaders of services sourcing strategy is now, what design or mixed-model works bet for your oragnisational make-up?

• Deciding what’s actually regarded as core to your business
• What’s your starting point? Where you are now can influence your next step
• How much flexibility and internal control does your business need?
• Mapping out your infrastructure and technology landscape and requirements
• Service culture expectations: Weighing internal vs. external advantages
• What are the key considerations surrounding risk analysis before the board will commit to an outsourcing deal

Panelists:

Caren Schadel-Sevil
Director Human Resources APAC & LATAM
Sun Microsystems

Andrew Crawford
Head of Operational Risk & Compliance
Westpac

George Robinson
Head of Finance, Operations & Technology, Global Consumer Group
Citigroup Australia

Moderator:

Mohit Sharma
Director
Mindfields

6.25 Panel Discussion: Small Is Beautiful But Is Big Necessary? Evaluating The Impact Of SSO Size On Efficiency

If Shared Services is about consolidating, integrating and transforming to achieve economies of scale, skill and scope, what is the right size of a SSO in terms of people and resources? Some SSOs, particularly in the Government Sector, are larger than many private and public companies. Is the size an obstacle, does it magnify the hurdles, does it require more experienced managers? Is the principle “Small is Beautiful” a preferred organisational structure?

• At what point do you say this is becoming too difficult?
• How many services should you integrate into one SSO?
• Does the Governance structure need to change?

Panelists:

Guy Nicholson
GM Shared Services
Department of Primary Industries

Brain Roche
Executive Director
Shared Services WA

Cesare Callioni
Chief Business Strategy Officer at Shared Service Agency
Queensland Government

Mohit Sharma
Director
Mindfields